The day after Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech before the U.N. Security Council Wednesday, TV commentators and newspaper editorials, and even many liberal pundits, declared their support for the Bush administration's hard-line stance on Iraq. CNN’s Bill Schneider said that “no one” disputed Powell’s findings. Bob Woodward, asked by Larry King on CNN what happens if we go to war and don’t find any WMD, answered: “I think the chance of that happening is about zero. There’s just too much there.”

I also found this, much worse, when Howard Kurtz belatedly did a review of The Washington Post's deeply flawed prewar coverage: “(Bob) Woodward, for his part, said it was risky for journalists to write anything that might look silly if weapons were ultimately found in Iraq.” Woodward was an editor at the Post and therefore influenced and at times helped decide the handling of some of its key coverage. Woodward later admitted, "I think I dropped the ball here. I should have pushed much, much harder on the skepticism about the reality of WMD." No kidding.

UPDATE: My new piece at The Nation explores Kurtz piece and Post misconduct. Also see my new post on David Brooks' column, ten years ago, backing Iraq invasion and mocking critics.

Greg Mitchell's influential book "So Wrong For So Long," on the media and the Iraq war, was published today in an expanded edition for the first time as an e-book.

6 comments:

Can we get over this idea that everyone believed there were weapons of mass distruction in Iraq before Bush invaded? The invasion was about getting the oil. U.S. Tiger Teams inside Iraq reported that Sadam's computer banks held nothing about WMD. All the higher ups knew that bin Laeden and Sadam were blood enemies and that bin Laedin offered to go in and kill him as an alternative to the first Gulf War. Everyone also knew that bin Laeden attacked in order to get the U.S. out of Saudi Arabia, which Bush did immediately after 9/11. Can we move on from this fantisy that everyone was afraid of Saddam?

People forget that Bob Novak consistently reported that the evidence for WMD in Iraq was slim to non-existent. Someone was telling him that -- someone in the military, in the CIA, somewhere. Who was it? There were clearly informed voices out there who were willing to talk, but very few were willing to listen. And now the people who refused to listen pretend that "everyone" was on the same page. No. "Everyone" was not.

John Rohan, How about reading the article you cite. Degraded (read: useless) chemical weapons are not WMD's.

From TFA :“This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991,” the official said, adding the munitions “are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war.”

To Anonymous 2: hotair.com is NOT World News Daily. Actually, I believe that a lot of the WMDs that Sadaam Hussein had were smuggled into Israel (by either the US or the Israelis themselves) and used on the Palestinians in Gaza in 2005 during Israel's offensive against them....

New Edition of U.S. vs. Pvt. Manning Book

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G.M. is the author of more than a dozen books (click on covers above and below), the longtime editor of Editor & Publisher and until recently a daily writer for The Nation. Email: epic1934@aol.com. Twitter: @GregMitch